Bettina Pousttchi: UNN (United Nations Nuremberg)

Bettina Pousttchi has realized a freestanding pavilion at Klarissenplatz in Nuremberg in front of the Neues Museum that opens an illusionistic, photographic space. The Berlin-based artist is well known for her facade works realized around the world. These works create a consciousness for their specific location by way of a photographic transfer of a space and a historical point in time; the same applies to her Nuremberg project.

The Secretariat Building at UN Headquarters in New York, designed primarily by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, serves as a point of departure. On the square in front of Neues Museum, the black and white photography installation in the form of a large pavilion establishes a link between the important headquarters of international understanding and Nuremberg, a historically charged city, both as a site once used by the Nazi regime for demonstrations of their political power and as today’s city of human rights.

The link created by the artist in the pavilion between this iconic building and Nuremberg is based on the assumption that International Criminal Law, which has become so important for our understanding of democracy, developed in part on the basis of the Nuremberg Trials. The artistic narration interweaves this organization as an association of all nations with the history of the city of Nuremberg.

Could the UN, which also has seats in Vienna, Geneva, and Bonn, not have had headquarters in Nuremberg as well, for historical reasons? Part of Bettina Pousttchi’s artistic fiction is that an international institution could also be located in Nuremberg. This now becomes manifest in the pavilion UNN (United Nations Nuremberg) for the course of the summer.

Bettina Pousttchi (*Mainz 1971) is a German-Iranian artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Arts Club of Chicago,the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the Kunsthalle Basel, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen and the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin.

Auxillary programm

UNN-PAVILION-TALK: October 6, 12pm
Speakers: 
Bettina Pousttchi, Artist
Oliver Ulich, Head of “Policy and Partnership” at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UN Secretariat, Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Wagner, Director, Bewerbungsbüro Kulturhauptstadt Europas 2025, and Dr. Eva Kraus, Director, Neues Museum Nürnberg